Share this story

Access to The Martian’s Toronto premiere required Ars Technica to allow 20th Century Fox to pay for airfare and hotel. We’re new to the hands-on film review scene, but this is standard practice in the film world. We’re attempting to figure out the best way to handle this, but in this case as we ramp up our movie coverage, we have allowed Fox to cover our costs so that we could bring you this inside reporting from the premiere.

Before heading over to Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall for the premiere of The Martian this past Friday, I spent three hours at the pre-show gala, feeling very underdressed and trying not to gawk as the room slowly filled with a bunch of incredibly beautiful and/or famous people. Fortunately, The Martian author Andy Weir was one of the first people to show up, and being the incredibly gracious fellow he is, he didn’t seem to mind that I parked myself on his elbow for the evening.

And as it turns out, hanging out with Andy Weir at the premiere of The Martian is definitely the right choice if you want to be introduced to a whole lot of famous people. Actual-for-real space hero Chris Hadfield showed up, along with a string of important NASA folks (including NASA Chief Planetary Scientist Dr. James Green, who consulted on the film and with whom I got to speak at length the next day). Matt Damon said he actually remembered our phone interview from a couple of weeks ago. 20th Century Fox CEO Jim Goanopulos stood and talked with me for probably five solid minutes about the movie and how proud he was of it.

Author Andy Weir at left talks with real-life space hero Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, along with Hadfield's spouse Helene Hadfield. At right is The Martian producer Aditya Sood. Please forgive the following set of iPhone photographs—it was the only camera I was allowed to carry into the gala.

Lee Hutchinson

Weir at right, along with girlfriend Keri Kukral of RawScience. At left is Warren Betts, our main PR contact on The Martian.

Andy Weir's mother, moments before she was spirited away by Sean Bean.

Lee Hutchinson

The next day would be filled with formal interviews and questions and photos, but the pre-show gala was purely for mingling and elbow rubbing. Andy Weir was with his girlfriend Keri Kukral (who is not only an avowed Ars reader, but also a badass electrical engineer and who does her own science writing at RawScience). Weir had also brought along his mother, and watching him introduce her around to the celebrities in the room was pretty adorable—especially when Sean Bean bummed a cigarette off her and they went outside to smoke together. The last time I saw her she was headed to the door on Bean’s arm, telling him how handsome he was in Sharpe.

Insist on science

But enough soft stuff, let’s talk about the movie. The next day, we were all herded into Fox’s hospitality area on the 4th floor of the Toronto Ritz Carlton, where a small army of smiling but firm PR specialists ran the day’s schedule down to the minute. After a series of one-on-one interviews and another series of small round-table discussions, I came away with more of an understanding of how and why the movie ended up like it did.

The story behind how the book version of The Martian came to be is pretty well known, but the transition from book to movie actually started back when The Martian was still a self-published ebook on Amazon. Producer Aditya Sood noticed it then and, after buying it, he read it in a single night like so many others. "It’s one of those incredible moments you always dream of where you find a piece of material that really nobody has read," Sood explained. "The veracity of what Andy had done was incredible and that alone was so compelling, but what was amazing about the book and transcendent about it, and why it felt like it was going to be much more than just a great science fiction piece was the voice of Mark," he continued, referencing the book’s main character, stranded astronaut Mark Watney. "It’s one of the warmest, funniest books I’ve ever read—and you never see that in science fiction."

Sood turned the book over to producer Simon Kinberg, and 20th Century Fox then optioned the rights to the film. Drew Goddard was assigned to write the script (and, at one point, Goddard was also on board as the director before Ridley Scott was picked). For his part, Goddard had nothing but praise for Weir’s writing—and the fact that the book had gone through so many revisions as part of its serial journey to self-publishing meant that the script only needed a very abbreviated revisioning process.

"I just took Andy’s book and put it in a screenwriting program," Goddard joked. "When we found the book, it was done…When we went to the studio, I remember I said to them, 'Listen, don’t buy this unless you want this book. I’m not going to change anything—I’m just going to get this book on screen.' Andy did all the hard work—it was there. It’s nice when you see that in a novel—it fits a structure that we can make work onscreen."

In spite of the strength of the source material, Goddard at first had reservations that he was the right guy to pull a script out of Weir’s book. Although he grew up in Los Alamos, surrounded by scientists in an all-science town, he obviously isn’t a scientist himself. "When they sent me the book," he explained, "I read it in one sitting, and then the next day I read it again, and then the next day I read it again. And on the surface, it didn’t seem like a good idea at all! Like, 'hey, here’s an ebook! And it [the movie] is going to be really expensive! You’re about to embark on something hard.' I’m like, 'can I do a Hunger Games or something?'"

But Goddard couldn’t shake the book’s story from his head. His wife soon put things in perspective, telling him that at its core The Martian is about the same kind of scientists Goddard grew up with in his home town. "As soon as she said that, this light went off in my head… I realized that was what it was. It was a book about scientists, and I’d never heard scientists captured the way Andy captured them."

Now on board, Goddard had one stipulation for the script—it had to stay smart. "I don’t know if we dumbed it down if we would have a movie," he said. "So much of the movie is about the intelligence—if you took that out, I’m not sure what it would be." Goddard explained that he told the studio that dumbing the script down would sink the story, and the studio agreed. "It took a lot of faith on their part," he said. "It was really sort of satisfying the first time we watched it with an audience, and to hear the first thing they said was they really liked how smart it was. It was really nice. It’s sort of counterintuitive to the way Hollywood in general thinks."

Share this story

Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com